Maria Pettersson

Maria Pettersson

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As a child, Maria Pettersson’s dream job was to be an international adventurer. Instead, she became an award-winning journalist, the editor-in-chief of several magazines and a serious history geek. She has worked for the biggest newspapers, radio stations and TV channels in Finland. She has travelled in over 70 countries, got married in Vegas and spent her honeymoon in North Korea. Her hobbies include games and roleplaying, observing big machines, studying small Slavic languages and visiting dead dictators. She currently lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Extraordinary Women of History

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Extraordinary ”Badass” Women of History – meet Pirates, Psychics, Priestesses and Princess Spies and 96 other women whose stories your history teacher never told you.

The captain who ruled the biggest pirate fleet in history. The scientist who changed our understanding of physics, while taking the most famous geniuses of her time as her lovers, and getting in trouble for gambling. The con-artist who could fool any jeweler in Europe. The baseball star who played wearing a fake beard. Teenagers recruited by the Resistance because of their innocent looks, who learned to blow up railways and shoot Nazis from their bicycles. The master of Jujutsu who taught the Suffragettes to fight back. The cult leader who made her followers undergo cosmetic surgery to look more like her. The kidnapped girl who ended up ruling the biggest empire that had ever existed, with her female lover as her queen.

Extraordinary Women of History introduces over a hundred exceptional women from different periods of history and from all corners of the world. It is a veritable treasury of captivating stories and unsung ballads about the exciting women in history. Outrageous, amazing, terrible, heroic, thrilling and above all extraordinary; their life stories make the reader gasp and ask: “Why haven’t I heard of them before?”

Extraordinary Women of History is the nonfiction event of 2020. Maria Pettersson shared brief vignettes of exciting historical women on social media. Several publishers fought for the book rights, and the book raised the second-biggest crowdfunding total for a book in Finnish history and was immediately made into a podcast series by the Finnish public broadcasting company. It has enjoyed exceptional media coverage and has been featured in almost all noteworthy newspapers, the biggest magazines and on every Finnish TV channel. The second printing came out on the same day that the book was published, and the third three days later.

Rights sold:

FINLAND: Atena (orig.)
ESTONIA: Äripäev